Magical winged sandals turned out to be eminently doable, and easier to use than the hovering platforms had been. In fact, Dani found them easier to work than her wings had been… she didn’t even have to really think about flying any more than she had to think about walking.
“I think it’s because the sandals give me the power of flight, where the platform was doing the lifting and the wings had to, you know, be wings,” Dani said as she looped back and forth over Perfect’s head.
“This is still not making a heck of a lot of sense to me,” Perfect said. “I mean, that the ring has the power to create a magic object that can imbue you personally with the power of flight, but you can’t just use the ring to fly in the first place? It seems like the ring that can do this should be capable of so much more but somebody deliberately put a bunch of arbitrary and nonsensical constraints on it.”
“Hey, I think it’s pretty arbitrary and nonsensical that the ring can do anything,” Dani said. “I’m not going to argue with something that lets me make a magic beam sword or a bow with infinite arrows just because it can’t also do a laser gun and a jetpack.”
“But why couldn’t it?” Perfect asked.
“I don’t know… wrong genre?”
“Well, obviously, it would be a magical construct shaped like a gun that shoots beams like the sword,” Perfect said. “There would be no reason it would need to be shaped like that… it might be more convenient to aim, but if it can make a sword or a wand or whatever that projects some sort of attack, why not a gun?”
“Hey, wait,” Dani said, stopping in mid-air. She flexed both of her hands and there was a bright flash of blue light as the sandals vanished. She dropped a couple of inches and then steadied again.
“You figured out how to fly without using an object, after all?” Perfect asked.
“Not exactly,” Dani said, holding out her left hand to show a plain blue band around the ring finger. “I just made a magical ring of flight.”
“That makes even less sense!”
“No, really, it doesn’t,” Dani said. “I got the idea from what you said: the ring can make a magic object that imbues me with the power of flight. Winged sandals obviously work for that specifically, but the most basic gives-wearer-powers magic object is probably a magic ring. I mean, there are rings of fire resistance and rings of strength…”
“So… could you just make a ring at the start of the night that does all of that, every power your ring could put into a magic item?”
“Probably not,” Dani said. “No one likes a munchkin. I mean, it’d be like trying to make winged sandals that do flight and superstrength… the flight makes sense, the strength doesn’t, you know? A ring that does both of those plus a bunch of heightened senses and damage resistance would be like basically a ‘ring of being a superhero’, and I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“That’s pretty much what you’re wearing, though,” Perfect said. “Except it makes you play all these ridiculous games to get any use out of it… are you sure these limitations aren’t just mental blocks?”
“Oh, dear,” a voice said from the end of the alley. “You said she needed a little help with the magical perspective, but you didn’t tell me she was nearly as bad as you are.”
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